Using Ansible Pull

Overview

Have you ever wanted to create a wide-open file share on your LAN to enable your users to quickly and easily share files? In this video, the viewer is shown the process of setting up a custom Samba implementation on Debian/Ubuntu that makes sharing files on your LAN easy.

Relevant Links
Original Video

Setting up

You will need a Git repository for this tutorial. The easiest method is to create an account on Github if you don't already have one, and create a repository there. Witch each example that references the Git repository, replace what you see with the URL for yours. Create the repository

Make sure you have git installed, on Debian/Ubuntu (etc) you can do that with:

 sudo apt update
 sudo apt install git

You will also need Ansible installed. On Debian/Ubuntu (etc) you can do that with:

 sudo apt update
 sudo apt install git
 sudo apt install ansible

It's a good idea to create an ssh-key as well:

 ssh-keygen

First iteration

The first version of our playbook installs a single package, to show how ansible-pull works.

Here's the playbook file:

local.yml

 - hosts: localhost
   connection: local
   become: true
 
   tasks:
   - name: Install htop
     apt:
       name: htop

Push the changes to the repository

Before you can use this playbook via ansible-pull, you'll need to push it up to your repository, you can do that with:

 git add local.yml
 git commit -m "initial commit"
 git push origin master

Run the playbook

After the playbook has been pushed, you can run it with the following command (change the repository URL to match yours):

 sudo ansible-pull -U https://github.com/<your_user_name>/ansible.git

Second Iteration

With the second version of our playbook, we add a few more packages.

local.yml (second version)

 - hosts: localhost
   connection: local
   become: true
 
   tasks:
   - name: Install packages
     apt:
       name:
         - htop
         - mc
         - tmux

Push the new version to the repository

 git add local.yml
 git commit -m "added additional packages to local.yml"
 git push origin master

Run it

 sudo ansible-pull -U https://github.com/<github_user>/ansible.git

Third Iteration

The third version changes the local.yml file to be more of an index, that pulls in other files.

Reorganizing the file layout

Create a directory in the repository to hold taskbooks:

 mkdir tasks

Move the current local.yml to packages.yml in the new directory:

 mv local.yml tasks/packages.yml

local.yml (third version)

 - hosts: localhost
   connection: local
   become: true
 
   pre_tasks:
     - name: update repositories
       apt:
         update_cache: yes
       changed_when: False

   tasks:
     - include: tasks/packages.yml

We move the play that installs packages out of local.yml and into its own file:

tasks/packages.yml

 - name: Install packages
   apt:
     name:
       - htop
       - mc
       - tmux

Commit and push the changes so far:

 git add .
 git commit -m "reorganized file layout"
 git push origin master

Run it

 sudo ansible-pull -U https://github.com/<github_user>/ansible.git

Fourth Iteration

The fourth version of our config sets up full automation, so that our hosts will continue to check in after running the playbook once. We do this by having Ansible set up a cron job for itself, as well as create a background user to run Ansible with.

Adding users and a cron job

Create a taskbook for users:

tasks/users.yml

 - name: create ansible user
   user:
     name: ansible
     system: yes
 
 - name: copy sudoers_ansible
   copy:
     src: files/sudoers_ansible
     dest: /etc/sudoers.d/ansible
     owner: root
     group: root
     mode: 0440

Create a directory to hold files

 mkdir files

files/sudoers_ansible

 ansible ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

Create a taskbook to add cron jobs

tasks/cron.yml

 - name: install cron job (ansible-pull)
   cron:
     user: ansible
     name: "ansible provision"
     minute: "*/10"
     job: "/usr/bin/ansible-pull -o -U https://github.com/jlacroix82/ansible_pull_tutorial.git > /dev/null"

Update local.yml so that it imports the new taskbooks we've added:

local.yml

 - hosts: localhost
   become: true
   pre_tasks:
     - name: update repositories
       apt:
         update_cache: yes
       changed_when: False

   tasks:
     - include: tasks/users.yml
     - include: tasks/cron.yml
     - include: tasks/packages.yml

Commit and push the new changes

 git add .
 git commit - m "added cront and user taskbooks"
 git push origin master

Run it

sudo ansible-pull -U https://github.com/<github_user>/ansible.git